Biographies
President
Bobray Bordelon
Bobray Bordelon joined Princeton University as the Economics & Finance Librarian in 1993 and has led its Data & Statistical Services since 2004. He is the former director of the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA). He is currently the Vice-President of IASSIST and previously served as a Member at Large. During his more than two decades of being active in IASSIST, he has witnessed the birth of many specialized data organizations, but IASSIST remains the big tent international association. Its strength is its global membership that supports all stages of the data life cycle. His goals include increased outreach to less represented areas of the world to further strengthen our membership and continuing to have IASSIST provide the tools to provide curation, access, subject and functional knowledge, and service to data.
Vice President
Dylanne Dearborn
Dylanne Dearborn is the Research Data Management Coordinator at University of Toronto Libraries. She has worked in the area of research data at U of T for the last fourteen years, building strategic directions for service and infrastructure as well as providing support and training to researchers. She is actively engaged in collaborative initiatives at the local, national, and international level. Dylanne has been serving as a member of the IASSIST Administrative Committee since 2019 as a Member at Large for Canada and was the Co-Chair for the Local Arrangements Committee for IASSIST 2024 in Halifax.
Treasurer
Jennifer Doty
Jennifer Doty is the Research Data Program Manager at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Jen has been an active member of IASSIST since 2012, served as the appointed Membership Committee Chair from 2017-2021, and was elected Treasurer in 2021. If re-elected, Jen welcomes the opportunity to continue to serve members as Treasurer, working closely with the Executive and Administrative Committees to maintain IASSIST’s healthy financial standing and further develop this strong and supportive community of data professionals.
Regional Secretary (Africa)
Winny Nekesa Akullo
Winny Nekesa Akullo is a Records Manager at National Social Security Fund – Uganda. IASSIST has been an invaluable community for her, fostering professional growth, collaboration, and access to global expertise in data services and information technology. IASSIST represents a platform for learning, networking, and contributing to the advancement of research and open science globally.
If elected as the Regional Secretary – Africa, she will enhance regional representation by advocating for greater participation from Africa and other underrepresented regions, ensuring diverse voices are included in global discussions. She will continue promoting capacity building through workshops, training sessions/webinars, and knowledge-sharing initiatives equipping with advanced skills in data management and research. She will also foster collaboration across Africa and beyond, uniting professionals from various disciplines to address regional/global challenges in social science data management. She is very eager to serve and contribute to the growth of the IASSIST community while supporting its mission of promoting the effective use of data in research and teaching across Africa.
Regional Secretary (Asia/Pacific)
Sam Spencer
Sam Spencer is CEO and co-founder of Aristotle Metadata and leader in government data management and data governance. Through the development of Aristotle Metadata Registry, Sam has worked on a range of data initiatives across the Australian government, providing input ranging from broader data policy to the development of local metadata teams within departments. Prior to this, he was an experienced public servant with experience across a range of agencies and portfolios including health, statistics and policy. This experience helped him see a market need for user-friendly, standardised metadata tools to help governments improve how they manage their information. Sam is a recognised leader in data management, having presented research on data standards and solutions at conferences in Australia and internationally. His personal goal is to demystify data management and aims to make metadata more accessible to everybody.
Sam feels his experience in the public sector working as a data manager has translated to developing a growing international software business that is changing how organisations approach data management. As a company founder, part of his role is marketing why data management and metadata are important skills that organisations must invest in. This has led to the development of number methodologies for breaking down and making metadata more approachable. He intends to bring this skillset to the committee of IASSIST to ensure that the association is on the forefront of data accessibility and governance.
Regional Secretary (Canada)
Carla Graebner
Carla Graebner is the Research Data Services Librarian and Librarian for Government Information at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Carla is active in issues relating to long-term access and preservation of government information including data. She is the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) representative and the ICPSR Official Representative for SFU. She also serves as one of two Western Canada representatives to the Statistics Canada’s DLI External Advisory Committee and is a long standing member of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s Data Management Planning Expert Group. Carla has been a member of IASSIST since 2011 and has participated in IASSIST by delivering workshops and conference presentations and acting as a peer reviewer for the IASSIST Quarterly. Carla holds a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario and two BAs (English and Film Studies; Anthropology) from Carleton University.
Carla feels that IASSIST is more than an association, it’s a community. That was her impression when she joined the association in 2011 and remains so today. As a member of IASSIST, she has been a beneficiary of the expertise and support of fellow members and would like to contribute back by standing for Regional Secretary, Canada. As Regional Secretary for Canada, she would be honoured to follow in Jane Fry’s footsteps and continue to inform the IASSIST membership about data-related initiatives and information related to Canada and advocate and promote IASSIST both within and outside of Canada.
Regional Secretary (Europe)
David Schiller
Prof. David H. Schiller has been working as a lecturer for data infrastructures and operational data management at the Institute for Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons in Chur Switzerland since March 2019.
David studied sociology and history at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and worked in the ‘Data Warehouse’ and ‘Methods’ departments of the National Educational Panel Study at the University of Bamberg, the Research Data Centre of the Federal Employment Agency at the Institute for Employment Research, where he was responsible for the conception and further development of infrastructures for the social sciences in international projects, at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences where he worked in the ‘Data Archive for Social Sciences’ area ‘Data Linking and Data Security’ and in the ‘Survey Design and Methodology’ area ‘Survey Operations’. David was also Managing Director of a company developing software solutions for the social sciences and a member of the German Data Council in Germany.
David has been European Secretary for the IASSIST before. Now located in Switzerland, David worked in European Projects about Data Infrastructures and is well connected within European Data Archives and Data Services. He is happy to go on building a strong European Community as part of IASSIST.
Regional Secretary (USA)
Maggie Marchant
Maggie Marchant is the Economics, Finance, and Social Sciences Data Librarian at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, USA. As a relatively new member of IASSIST, Maggie feels it has already been so useful to learn from other members and find belonging in the data services and resources community. As a regional secretary, she hopes to continue to learn and to use her enthusiasm for data and building connections to support and build IASSIST.
Member at Large (Canada)
Amber Leahey
Amber Leahey is the Service Director for Borealis, a national research data repository provided by the University of Toronto Libraries in partnership with academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. She is also the Data & GIS Librarian at Scholars Portal, a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), where she manages the Odesi and Scholars GeoPortal data repositories supporting researchers and data users with discovery and access to high-quality, curated data collections.
Member at Large (Europe)
Flavio Bonifacio
Flavio Bonifacio has carried out research in the socio-economic field and has worked in the field of data analysis and data science since the late seventies. He has dealt with problems regarding the school system by publishing several books and articles on the subject (some examples: Pour un modèle scientifique du système scolaire, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1996, Misurare il successo nel Sistema scolastico Italiano (Measuring success in the Italian school system), L’Harmattan, Torino, 2010).
He designed the model for forecasting student flows and teacher needs in the various school levels for the Piedmont Region. He has dealt with research methods and quantitative analysis problems and is skilled in carrying out surveys, from data gathering to data analysis. He currently leads Metis Ricerche, a private agency located in Turin, Italy. He is also the project manager of the Master in Data Analysis for Business Intelligence and Data Science designed and conducted by Metis Ricerche in collaboration with the University of Turin
Since early eighties (1981, IASSIST Conference in Grenoble) one of his major interests is data documentation, preservation, sharing and reuse. Flavio Bonifacio is member of IASSIST organisation, he is skilled beyond survey research, in Data Management and Analysis. The main hobby of Flavio is the music, and he is songwriter (see Spotify, and search for Flavio Bonifacio, the album name is Fuori Tempo (“out of time”), published in 2023)
Member at Large (USA) (3 seats)
Stephanie Labou
Stephanie Labou is the Data Science Librarian with the University of California San Diego Library. A self-described “data enthusiast”, Stephanie spends her time helping students and faculty find, access, analyze, and visualize data. She also teaches short-form workshops on coding skills and data best practices and enjoys nothing more than introducing students and peers to the wonderful world of programmatic and reproducible data analysis. She has lots of IASSIST related experience including:
- Co-chaired the 2020/2021 IASSIST annual conference (the best virtual IASSIST ever!)
- Co-founded University of California Love Data Week and led UC San Diego involvement for past 5 years
- Active in other data organizations such as ICPSR
- Experience working as a data professional in research setting before transitioning to a library role
Stephanie says that IASSIST has been foundational for developing her career as a data professional, and she is excited about the opportunity to become more involved in the organization. As data becomes ever more popular and available across disciplines, so too does the need for rigorous best practices, and information sharing among data professionals within and between countries. She looks forward to the chance to help promote IASSIST and support the ever-growing data-adjacent communities within libraries, archives, government organizations, and other data groups. She feels she has lots to offer the community in this role, such as:
- Enthusiasm for IASSIST, data, and data services in general
- Ideas for promoting and introducing IASSIST to the next generation of data professionals
- Connections to regional and national data-related groups in USA and commitment to expanding that network to benefit IASSIST activities
Sophia Lafferty-Hess
Sophia Lafferty-Hess obtained an M.S. in Information Science and a Master of Public Administration from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Sophia has focused her career on supporting researchers as they manage and share their data with a passion for enhancing data access and reuse. Sophia currently works at Duke University Libraries as a Research Data Management Consultant where she provides consultations and instruction as well as contributes to the data curation and repository program. Prior to joining Duke, Sophia worked at the UNC Odum Institute for Research in Social Science Data Archive. Sophia is actively involved in the Data Curation Network where she chairs the Education Committee as well as leads a project to develop specialized data curation trainings for unique data types.
Sophia’s research interests have included the development of verification workflows for reproducibility, understanding the value of curation, enhancing data curation literacy, and engaging with researchers on data sharing outreach. Sophia has been a member of IASSIST since 2015 serving as a US Member at Large since 2019 and serving on the Program Committee for IASSIST 2024, she is excited to continue to contribute to this dynamic data community.
Diana L. Magnuson
Diana is currently at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation (ISRDI) at the University of Minnesota where she holds positions of Curator and Historian
She first encountered IASSIST in 2015 at the annual conference in Minneapolis, her home city. The IASSIST sessions that she attended had an immediate impact on her work as a professor of history and director of archives at a university in St. Paul, Minnesota. In September 2021, she became a curator and historian at ISRDI. She overlapped with ISRDI data archivist Wendy Thomas for nine months until her retirement in June 2022. Their final training together was international travel and a presentation at IASSIST 2022 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The IASSIST community embraces newcomers and folds them into the vibrant social science information service and technology work and culture. She is grateful for the expertise, support, and enthusiasm IASSIST members have offered to her and ISRDI at the annual conference and beyond. She believes that serving as a USA Member at Large will deepen her understanding of the association and enable her to further invest in carrying forward the vital work of IASSIST and its diverse membership.
HD McKay
HD McKay is currently Librarian for Business and Lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. She launched her career as a Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries and then held a variety of roles at a corporate non-profit innovation center. Following this ‘10-year-sabbatical’ in industry, she returned to academic librarianship to apply her trans-disciplinary skills to library land. She has published, presented and delivered workshops on topics such as harnessing value tensions for purpose driven work, navigating ethical boundaries of design research, data visualization and storytelling, market sizing for new ventures, relationship building in liaison work, and using animated videos to introduce information literacy concepts. She has presented in local, regional, national and international conferences on these topics. Past and current service to the profession include significant roles within the American Library Association’s Business Reference And Service Section, Special Library Association, SOUCABL (Southern Universities and College Academic Business Librarians), the Tenn-Share statewide consortium, the Southeast Data Librarian Symposium (SEDLS), as well as a variety of opportunities to judge student research and award competitions on campus. She holds a Master of Information Studies (Libraries stream) from the University of Toronto.
HD is standing to be a Member-at-large (MAL) because she feels she has much to offer and gain from this opportunity. IASSIST plays a vital role in fostering community, developing capacity and celebrating excellence for information and data professionals in the social sciences. She also knows that it relies on committed professional volunteers to run well. As a mid-career business librarian, she can contribute exceptional collaboration, facilitation and organizational skills to the IASSIST Administrative Committee. She developed and honed these skills over nearly 2 decades in diverse roles such as market intelligence analyst, UX designer, program manager, and innovation strategy consultant. Such range allows her to meaningfully and productively engage with many types of topics and stakeholders, while bringing a depth of expertise in the work of libraries. She also wants to deepen and sharpen her qualitative and mixed methods research practice while also maturing her leadership competencies. As a new-ish member of IASSIST, she believes the MAL role is an excellent service opportunity to accomplish all these goals.
Elisabeth Shook
Elisabeth Shook is the Data Impact Librarian at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), where she works with a team to expand the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Prior to ICPSR, Elisabeth served as the Head of Scholarly Communications and Data Management at Boise State University. She earned a Master’s of Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Elisabeth has over a decade of experience in scholarly communications and data management.
Since joining ICPSR, Elisabeth has sought to become a more engaged participant in the social science research community, including joining IASSIST and presenting at its annual conference. She believes in IASSIST’s mission to support data professionals across the research ecosystem in their efforts to discover, curate, and preserve research data. Elisabeth is eager to contribute her expertise to IASSIST’s goal of strengthening the global network of social science data professionals through serving the community as a Member at Large.